Mamdouh Habib

Please support my work! Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of […]

The gulf between what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East and the way it is perceived by the US intelligence services — as well as the gulf between how critics perceive America’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East, and how those policies are perceived by US intelligence — were recently exposed in an […]

In another exclusive report for Truthout, my friends and colleagues Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye continue to shine an unerring light on the Bush administration’s torture program (see previous examples here and here), this time focusing on the role played by Bruce Jessen, the Air Force psychologist, who, with his colleague James Mitchell, established the […]

Less than 24 hours since he delivered a pompous, reality-defying speech, insisting that he would stay in power until elections in September, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator for 30 years, has stepped down, providing the first major victory for the people’s revolution in Egypt, now in its 18th day. In a brief announcement on Egyptian State […]

For the United States and other Western countries, the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (which threaten to spread to other countries, including Yemen and Algeria) are something of a nightmare. Just as the authorities in these countries are struggling — and failing — to cope with popular uprisings, so too the United States and […]

As the people of Egypt continue to show no willingness to tolerate any longer the 30-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak, no one — least of all the Egyptian people — should be fooled into thinking that Mubarak’s response, appointing intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as his Vice President, constitutes any kind of change. As Stephen […]

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, […]

Using some old-fashioned clerical detective work, Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents around 10 percent of the remaining 240 prisoners in Guantánamo, has compiled a report, “Ghost Detention on Diego Garcia,” identifying one of two prisoners rendered through the British Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia as Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni (and tentatively identifying the other […]

Murat Kurnaz In a busy week for former Guantánamo detainees, Der Spiegel reports that the sole German ex-detainee, Murat Kurnaz –- born in Bremen but ignored by the German government until Angela Merkel came to power, because he was the son of Turkish immigrant workers (gastarbeiter) –- is making headway with his long-standing claim, which […]